Ask HN: Where do you host your startup web services?
I am looking for a solution that is cost-effective. I want to keep costs very low to start, but I can pay-as-I-grow for increased resources.
Imagine a URL shortening/redirecting service (e.g., bit.ly) That's not what my startup is about, but I will have that kind of traffic. I need to handle lots of hits to my web site, but each requires minimal processing and bandwidth. Top requirements are 99.9% uptime and low latency (< 20 ms).
A typical cheap/shared hosting service is not acceptable, even when just getting started, because they all suffer from downtime or "brownouts", where response latencies get slow if there's a traffic spike, of is some random user on the shared service is doing lots of database queries.
My application is currently built using Apache, MySQL, PHP, and C. I also need SSH access.
To process each "hit" to my web site, I have rather minimal requirements for CPU time, memory, database size, and data-transfer per hit.
What really seems to be the challenge (when just starting) is getting a guaranteed 99.9% uptime and low latency without paying a lot per month for dedicated hosting.
(I confess that I don't have any experience with Amazon EC2, so I don't know if that would be appropriate. If you have any practical experience with the time/cost to get up and running on "the cloud", I'd love to hear from you.)
Any recommendations, suggestions, comments, or advice would be much appreciated.
You can reply here, or by email.
Thanks in advance,
David Jones, PhD, Pairwise Affinity
dxjones@gmail.com, http://dxjones.com
djones@pairwiseaffinity.com, http://pairwiseaffinity.com